My attempt to create a new playermodel:


1810 Polys. = 3228 tris.
Textures mostly 1024²

Get the .blend to view it in realtime here!

Still not rigged nor animated in anyway. I'm to n00bish in animations. But let's see.

Textures:

• Diffusemap (for the colorz)
• Bumpmap (for the fine details)
• Normalmap (for the smoothing)
• Glowmap (for giving the eye a Corona)
• Shorts&Pants-map (for adding the playercolors)
• Specmap (For the win =))

Comments & Critics are always welcome.


Happy fraggin' !

What I have to say: VERY NICE MODEL! Compliments Bommel! I love head and arms, and textures seem very accurate. Thx for sharing!
For rigging I suggest you to take pyria .blend file and use pyria skeleton and .. that's it! Animations are already done!

Must say, very nice job. I hope you're going to stick around, we need good modelers like you. I wonder if someone could find a good use for this model.

Samual wrote:Must say, very nice job. I hope you're going to stick around, we need good modelers like you. I wonder if someone could find a good use for this model.

Yeah, Zombie vs. Driod (a'la Alien vs. Predator ) Keep up the good job, this model looks very interesting!

its amazing..very nice work..i may want to use this one if it makes it into 2.5.2

Thanks so far =)
No, I won't dissappear - no worries. Not after playing over 1 year and still having fun.

@ Samual:
Well, I can do some smaller things for sure. Someone just need to tell me..
(Mainly Modelling & Texturing)

@toneddu2000:
I wouldn't even had thought of that. Thanks for that hint!

But: I can't get the armature working. The model somehow explodes when trying to play an animation. (I used the pyria.blend from here)
May someone do that for me, or pointing me out what I have to do?
I guess it doesn't take very long but I'm just clueless regarding complexer animation stuff...
I shouldn't have overjumped that part in the wiki

Thanks in advance.

Hmm, did you rig the model? That involves selecting each bone and separately "painting" which vertices this bone should move in vertex paint mode. I was able to at least move the armature of my model like that, and to do some basic animations, but they failed in the game and I gave up in the end.

Hope you'll have better luck in exporting the model.

Is that the definitive model? Because if it is, I'll rig for you

The thing with animations you basically have to redo everything. You cannot use the current animations for other models unless you do exactly the same steps as the original author, or adjust the proper IDs. When one export to smd the bones each get a unique ID. The current animations and the base mesh already have those IDs which match. However, when you export the mesh it will most likely get different IDs than the animations, thus the whole thing will implode.

So, if you want that model in the game, you or someone else will have to create whole new animations. It's not the rigging that's the problem.

hmm ok I had the slight hope to reuse the rig.
Thanks for the info though.

But....

toneddu2000 wrote:Is that the definitive model? Because if it is, I'll rig for you

Yeeah it is! (only some texture fine tuning needs to be done)
I would be really really grateful if you could do that for me.
I'm just to unexperienced to rig/animate it myself good enough.


Greetings!

I didn't understand what ai said, but I used pyria model to create a new model for testing and it works! I don't know what ID stands for, but a thing is sure, the worst thing developers could do is to realize an animation system like that. The good thing IMO would be this: there are two files, the model file in rest position with a default-for-all skeleton and other files with ONLY the skeleton during animations poses. In this way one should only put the model in the folder, rename the .zymconfig file and that's it!Moreover, in this way, you could start to "make"grow up your format, because, if you have a default skeleton, with default names, you could say:"if left ankle bone is always l.ankle for a climbing stair animation I could use:"

if stair in front of player = true
then
l.ankle = rotate 30°
and l.foot tranlsate Z +20

or something equal (I'm not a coder I don't know what I wrote, someone stops me )

And, plus, ragdoll and physics could be embedded so there would not be more need of die poses because every death pose would be natural with ragdoll

take a look at
http://www.bloodfrontier.com/ and you'll understand what I mean

toneddu2000 wrote:In this way one should only put the model in the folder, rename the .zymconfig file and that's it!

Using the existing skeleton it might work. I don't remember if I tried that or not, I believe I would have but my memory sucks (if I did try it, it apparently didn't work for me as I would have just done that). If in fact the IDs are stored in the actual skeleton then your method shouldn't be a problem to implement. I actually need to try that again to freshen up my memory.

If it does work then just ignore what I said in the previews post.

for ai : in two weeks I should have more time and I hope to write a mini tutorial based on my personal testing (which maybe are wrong )and put online a default skeleton plus an example model so we'll be able to discuss it together!

for Bommel: I have serious problem with your model, first of all there are three instances of the same model and they seem identic, which one is the correct one?
second, an annoying bug mess out my rig: if I open the model it appears on 0.911 0.911 0.911 for XYZ scale, if I apply ctrl + A, if I lock the scale values or if I scale the mesh and save, it returns to original values (0.911 0.911 0.911) once I rotate or I close and reopen.
Whic Blender version do you use and on which OS? I'm using 2.49a on Ubuntu 9.04

Bommel wrote:Thanks so far =)
No, I won't dissappear - no worries. Not after playing over 1 year and still having fun.

@ Samual:
Well, I can do some smaller things for sure. Someone just need to tell me..
(Mainly Modelling & Texturing)

@toneddu2000:
I wouldn't even had thought of that. Thanks for that hint!

But: I can't get the armature working. The model somehow explodes when trying to play an animation. (I used the pyria.blend from here)
May someone do that for me, or pointing me out what I have to do?
I guess it doesn't take very long but I'm just clueless regarding complexer animation stuff...
I shouldn't have overjumped that part in the wiki

Thanks in advance.

Well, good news for you! See, we DO have a need for a new weapon model -- For a new gun. Basically it's called the fireball gun. Now, there aren't many details done on it yet, but we need three things in order for it to be released into Nexuiz: A new model, new sounds, and to finish balancing the weapon. I guess the general idea for the weapon is free for you to design.... Just keep it to the Nexuiz style of things, and don't make it TOOOOOO high poly. Also, make the weapon symmetrical for the most part. We have a left handed mode now, and we need the weapon to look basically the same on both sides. (You can do variation, but try not to do too much). The primary for the weapon shoots little sticky "flare" fireballs, and the secondary is large blast of fire turned into a projectile. If you're near the fireballs, then you light on fire for X amount of time after you get away from it. This is just a general description.

Anyway, if you could take the time on this, that would be FANTASTIC! Thanks.

By the way, divVerent is the one developing the fireball. So talk to him about details (I really don't know all that much at the moment).

Uff...much text


@ ai:
So, it might work? *Praying a little Hallejulia*

@ toneddu2000:
Three instances of the model? I know. As I saved & uploaded it I made the screenshot in my first post. Therefore the 3 models (originally placed like on the screenshot), but somehow they snapped back to the same position. They might be all the right ones...but I would take the one where the two color pickers in the Node editor appear when you select them. (the one with no *.001 or *.002)
To the scaling issue: I'm using openSUSE 11.1 & Blender 2.49a (SVN though - but that shouldn't be much different).
Normally appending it to a fresh file helps here.
I'm pretty sure that's somehow a bug.

Good luck with the armature!

@ Samual:
Mmkay, I'll try my best to find some time. *taking the sketching pencil*
How many time I've got?




Greetings.

i should have some time this week to rig this and make a zym. Cross your fingers.

Great!

*crosses fingers..*

By the way:
Started today with the Fireballgun:

Ah.. I love static models

As promised, here the zym http://www.box.net/shared/hi7czhcey6
If you place the .pk3 in the data folder it should work( I don't know if I set relative or absolute path texture, otherwise there is .blend file inside so tune it up!)
the pk3 includes:
1 blend file
1 zymscript for future models( so you don't have to create a new one)
1 .tga image for ingame menu (I put it only for you, so, when you'll create the definitive render, you'll be able to overwrite that without problems!use EQUAL name!)
1 zym obviously

I've encountered many topology problems in your mesh so I had to make little patches to the geometry. There were two faces in the wrist that caused the script to crash, infact it says

cannot multi-fold meshes (edges used by more then 2 faces)

Here is the problem:

Remember ALWAYS to delete these artifacts or your model won't be passed by exporter!

I apologize if I alter your model a bit(first of all I closed all holes), if you noticed that uv texture or geometry doesn't correspond to the original one, use the .blend that I posted for tuning.
However here is the screenshot ingame

cheers!

looks awesome...gonna try it out now!

Here's something weird I found. I used camera_enable 1 and watched a demo I had just made, and whenever I'm not firing, this specific model is holding his weapon down. I haven't seen any other models do this before. Is this intentional or what?

Very nice! BUT, the fireball gun must be fatter It shoots a big fireball, so. Anyway, great job.

MC SE7EN wrote:and whenever I'm not firing, this specific model is holding his weapon down. I haven't seen any other models do this before. Is this intentional or what?

No, is not intentional, I've seen it too, but I can't explain why the model carries the weapon in this way. The funny thing is that I used the same skeleton (founded in pyria .blend file, a huge thanks who did it ) for another model and that model works perfect! Tomorrow (now in italy is 4.00 am and I'm a little tired )I' ll try to repare theese animations!Thx for the hint MC SE7EN!!

VERY nice to see you have gotten it exported already! By the way, there's a handy tool in Blender which highlights these "holes" that the exporter won't like, select -> non-manifold in edit mode (or ctrl+alt+shift+M, blender key shortcuts rock)

NOOO!I didn't know it!!This is the typical example there's always something to learn!Thanks FruitieX for this precious hint!Infact yesterday I googled for this but I didn't find nothing!Well now I know!

Yeah, took some time for me to find it as well
Really useful though, as it's hard to NOT make this kind of mistakes...

Ah, that's what I call a good morning
Great work!

I found some smaller issues:
-The droid does not touch the floor. (look here - thx lost!)
- He looks somehow a bit small compared to other models.
- The Taunt animation is urr.... funny (He does NOT have boobs! - well, not really important)
- He's holding the right arm a bit strange in the 'run' and the 'idle' pose.
- ...and the strange weapon behaviour MC SE7EN already mentioned.


And thanks for fixing my topology. (Ha! I knew Select-> Non manifold before! )
I will do the beauty render now and some fixes in the texture.
I think afterwards it can be released...

Don't succeed in exporting myself at the moment though...

@ Samual: Going to be fatter next time. Can take some time though. I'm pretty stressed out right now


Greetings!

Bommel wrote:- The Taunt animation is urr.... funny (He does NOT have boobs! - well, not really important)

Heh, a side effect of using a female skeleton for animation. I haven't noticed it, but I'll watch for it now.

bommel, is that supposed to be a "fireball gun" or a "flamethrower" cause as it is, it's perfect for a flame thrower.

Bommel wrote:-The droid does not touch the floor. (look here - thx lost!)

Yeah, the screenshot is without shadows so is difficult to calculate how much the model is "floating" over the floor.There's in Nexuiz a command for look in front of the model, or to use the same model on all the bots?This is important so I can adjust feet height.

Bommel wrote:- He looks somehow a bit small compared to other models.

I don't know, I used Pyria skeleton in standard dimensions, but don't forget that the blend file had that annoying scale bug that I told you yesterday and maybe this is the problem. Don't worry, I'll scale a bit in the zymscript file.

Bommel wrote:- The Taunt animation is urr.... funny (He does NOT have boobs! well, not really important)

Yes, MC SE7EN is right! Using Pyria animations causes this "femalish" behaviours, well today I'll try to "masculinizing" it !:D

Bommel wrote:He's holding the right arm a bit strange in the 'run' and the 'idle' pose.

yes, as told to MC SE7EN, I don't know why previous model I used with pyria skeleton works flawless and this model doesn't. I'll check back.

Bommel wrote:- ...and the strange weapon behaviour MC SE7EN already mentioned.

Yes I'll try to fix this issue too.
A question: if I write a tutorial for creating models in blender plus a .blend neutral skeleton + all standard animations, would be useful for you guys? Lets's make a real-time poll!:D
Let me know your opinions!

Just a question: why not use the Marine skeleton for male characters?